msdm: mobile strategies of display & mediation

a project that will show the city is a museum without walls or not
Fifty years ago, André Malraux speculated about a “museum without walls” in which the easily reproducible character of the artwork would make it circulate in the city, in direct contact with its inhabitants. Marshall McLuhan went one step further and insisted that the mass media themselves were museums without walls, instantly available. Other authors such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard spoke of the “aestheticization of everyday life” to describe the blurring of boundaries between the real and the imaginary, and the total enmeshment of art into daily life that happens through the proliferation of media and art work into the city space.
In the midst of this spatial diversification, the institutional framework of art is still pervasive. This happens through the proliferation of museums where archives of collections are stored and displayed, the role played by curators and staff being the one of filter into the realm of culture what deserves to be collected and valued as cultural form. This work of filtering and validation has to do with power: who and what gets to be represented is a much contested domain appropriate for artistic interventions aiming at expanding the criteria of collections to include the signifiers of race, gender and class which have in many cases been left outside of the frame.
The other side of the expansion of the museum into daily life is the proliferation of public art initiatives. Presenting themselves as community orientated or spatially driven, many of these projects still perpetuate the modernist ideal of the museum in the public realm by separating, labeling, and cataloguing what deserves to become part of the definition of locality, to be construed as socially acceptable, and marketable for tourism and leisure commodification. Here also there is scope for artists interventions aiming at revealing the hidden, subtle mechanisms of power and reveal the discourse of public art as construction that needs to be challenged.

PROPOSAL
Work_shif:eastopia aims to follow the festivals’ curators conception of the artist as a researcher and of public art intervention as taking clues from the local space and community. Namely, the presentation of the bow festival to a group of invited artists and researchers was done through a series of lectures about the history/ sociology of the area and a guided tour providing with guidelines to possible aesthetic themes to explore.

The project relates to the idea of exploring/ surveilling the urban space for signs of aesthetic production, as a group of museum guards, dressed up in easily recognisable museum uniforms, invigilates the streets of bow. At the same time the project aims to react towards the common practice of parachuting artists into areas they do not know, to ‘ colonise’ or ‘ anthropologise’ the local community with external agendas, as the intervention only exists as a framework to support the already existing ‘art/landmarks’ and develops from the existing cultural urban landscape.

By conceptualising the framing of a public art project, the project tries to suggest a different notion of how art exists in the public realm. Departing from the work of the invigilators, it emphasises the dynamics of surveillance that are at play in the urban sphere but displacing it from negative connotations of crime into more positive assertions about aesthetics and daily life. Also, by employing people to work as invigilators of the ‘museum without walls’, the aspect of production knowledge is brought into the debate and power positions questioned as to has the right to select a collection and what kind of knowledge sustains these choices (academic, managerial vs. street based encounters) and the value of such collection (daily life residues vs. recognised works of art)

COMPONENTS
Workshop/ performance - how to invigilate the city/ urban museum
Set of behaviors museum attendants are taught as part of their professional routine but adapted to work in the streets

Seminar- how to maintain the urban museum? Specialists in art in cities come and talk about the parallel city/ museum, from constructivism utopian visions for the city of the future to current public art projects.

Additional/ parallel- a series of invigilating portraits. Each is a portrait of a museum guard at the site of a (in) famous inner city landmark, accompanied with a label, which indicates the slippage between the control of urban space and the aesthetic modernist ideal of exhibition, the aesthetic branding of spaces and the interventionist character of public art in urban spaces. To multiply the reading of the art in public space, from a monument to a performative piece.

paula roush